The Political Significance of Slave Resistance by James Oakes

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ The Political Significance of Slave Resistance by James Oakes When W.E.B. DuBois wrote that it was 'the black worker. who brought at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on May 31, 2015 civil war in America,' historians had yet to undertake the extraordinary studies of slavery that would eventually transform our understanding of all American history. Since then, scholars have discovered among the slaves a pattern of 'day-to-day resistance' which promises to give meaning and substance to DuBois's characterically astute observation. Slaves engaged in a variety of acts designed to ease their burdens and frustrate the masters' wills. They broke tools, feigned illness, deliberately malingered, 'stole' food, and manipulated the tensions between master and overseer. When pressed, the slaves took up more active forms of resistance: they became 'saucy', ran away, struck the overseer or even the master, and on rare occasions committed arson or joined in organized rebellions. And throughout the slave community a tradition of solidarity sustained and justified individual and collective acts of resistance.1 What has yet to be demonstrated is the political significance of slave resistance, and there are several reasons for this. Despite the methodo- logical and theoretical sophistication of the field, the ways in which social tensions were translated into political issues are still not well understood. Indeed, few historians have even attempted to trace the connections between everyday resistance and politics. Many scholars remain fixated on an artificial separation of morality from expediency in political analysis, as if 'morality' itself were not grounded in specific historical circumstances. But perhaps the most serious obstacle to further understanding has been the systematic disregard for the institutional political context of slavery and the sectional crisis. 90 History Workshop Journal It hardly needs to be said that slaves did not influence American politics with their votes, petitions, speeches, and editorials. Slaves could affect the political system only by intruding themselves into it as outsiders. But this simple observation points up some of the fundamental paradoxes of western slavery — paradoxes that reveal how and under what circumstances slave resistance could become politically significant. That slaves were social 'outsiders' in the Old South is no surprise; on the contrary, it places them squarely within a long tradition in western history extending Downloaded from back at least to Ancient Greece. The degree to which slaves were socially and political outcast varied enormously from one slave society to another, as did the consequences of their status. But their fundamental status as outsiders has been one of the few constants in the history of western slavery. (Moslem and African slavery did not always conform to this http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ pattern, and were distinct in several other ways as well.) To be a slave was to be socially and politically ostracized. This was true no matter how important slave labor was to the political and social system, and regardless of the fact that slaves often claimed an ancient ancestry in the land of their bondage. As M. I. Finely writes: 'In principle the slave is an outsider, a "barbarian", and that sets him apart from all the other forms of involuntary labour known to history.'2 For all their variety, therefore, slave societies have consistently tended at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on May 31, 2015 to produce dehumanizing cultural stereotypes that justified the slaves' exclusion from the social mainstream. In the minds of virtually every master class in history, slaves were somehow different 'by nature,' and often sub-human or animal-like. In a notorious passage in The Politics, Aristotle declared that 'a slave is a sort of living piece of property. The use made of slaves hardly differs at all from that of tame animals: they both help with their bodies to supply our essential needs. It is nature's purpose therefore to make the bodies of free men to differ from those of slaves. .'3 The American South was no exception. Southern masters went to extraordinary lengths to define the slaves as social outcasts in their very midst. At their disposal in this effort was a powerful cultural construct commonly known as 'race'. A peculiar congeries of prejudices and stereotypes, 'race' eventually became the most important ideological weapon in the struggle to distinguish free Southerners, most of whom traced their ancestry to western Europe, from enslaved Southerners who virtually always traced their origins to sub-saharan Africa. The slaveholders at once inherited, refined, and finally helped transform these prejudices into an ideology of pseudo-scientific racism that served as the primary justification for the enslavement of four million 'outsiders'. In the nineteenth century racism provided an artificial but nonetheless effective cultural barrier between masters and slaves who by that time were speaking the same language and praying to the same God.4 In the South, as in the ancient world, there was an underlying political Slave Resistance 91 purpose to the racist ideology. Though slavery historians are quite familiar with Aristotle's thinking, few have recognized that the philosopher's assertion of a natural physical distinction between slaves and free men served chiefly to introduce a proposition about the nature of citizenship and the polity. While the bodies of slaves were 'strong enough to be used for necessary tasks,' he argued, the bodies of free men were 'well suited for the life of a citizen of a state, a life which is in turn divided between the requirements of war and peace.' What was true of classical Athens was true Downloaded from of antebellum Mississippi: citizenship and slavery were incompatable. The difference was the specific racial gloss white men gave to their arguments about the basis of American democracy. As one Virginian declared in 1850, 'this Anglo-Saxon race of people in the United States of America are the only people ever formed by the hand of God, that are capable of self- http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ government.' If such remarks were commonplace, that is precisely why they were significant. By defining slaves according to 'race' and simul- taneously espousing a 'racial' criterion for political self-government, the slaveholders simply fitted themselves into a long-established western tradition.5 The implications of this political tradition have scarcely been appreci- ated. Because slaves were defined as outsiders, slave societies have been marked by a formal separation of the political institutions from the social at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on May 31, 2015 structure. Accordingly, the political structures of slave societies have not reflexively mirrored the intrinsic tyranny of the master-slave relationship but have been shaped instead by the institutional inheritance and social relations of the non-slave populations — the 'insiders'. This is why slave societies have flourished in a variety of political formations: the autocracy of the Roman Empire, the royal bureaucracies of Spanish-America, and the representative democracies of Periclean Athens and the Old South. One of the few political systems with which slavery was generally incompatible was feudalism, and the reasons for this are instructive. In medieval Europe, the social and political hierarchies were fused into a single structure, and the prevailing ideology reflected that fusion. In theory, seigneurialism incorporated the lowliest serf into an explicitly hierarchical but 'organically' unified society. By contrast, slaves were culturally and politically ostracised, and slavery was formally separated from the political structures. Thus the famous paradox of 'slavery and freedom' rested less on what slavery did to the political structure than on what it did not do.6 This does not mean that slavery had no effect on politics. On the contrary, the formal separation of slavery from the polity was simply the institutional context for the actual relationship between politics and society in the Old South. But that context was critical, for it defined the points at which slave resistance was likely to intrude into politics and the specific mechanisms through which the larger society reacted to those intrusions. In short, the relationship between slavery and the institutional political 92 History Workshop Journal arrangements determined the limits as well as the potential consequences of slave resistance. Any analysis of the political significnace of slave resistance in the United States must therefore begin from the recognition that the political structures within which slavery was embedded were not determined by slavery itself. Rather, 'slave law' in the United States was but one part of a much larger and more powerful body of Anglo-American law. As a legal entity, the master-slave relationship was defined by slave codes passed in Downloaded from representative legislatures, protected by state constitutions, and inter- preted by local and national judiciaries. Yet not one of those political structures was determined by or dependent upon slavery. Quite the reverse: the slaveholders' legal survival depended on political institutions that slavery did not create, and in the end this put the master class at a fatal http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ disadvantage.7 The slaveholders' domination of the

Load more